Forum:2018-05-25 (Friday)
Discussion for comic for . Genius is an infinite capacity for making edits. ---- It's amusing that Krosp, the first one you'd expect to get suspicious about this whole setup, ends up being the first one to get distracted by the delights being offered up. Of course, he is a cat, and those are fish.. --Geoduck42 (talk) 09:35, May 25, 2018 (UTC) Did Krosp engineer that fish-grabber? It wasn't in the lab when we left it, right? I suppose he might have asked Hadrian to assist him. :-) Installing something in a window without letting the water in isn't a trivial project! ➤ If the fish-grabber is Krosp's work, directly or indirectly, then it's interesting that it takes the form of a penny-arcade game, the one with the grapple over a pile of prizes (typically rigged because the grapple isn't strong enough to hold the heavy prizes, which are the ones you really want), rather than a more straightforward, automatic fish trap. That would mean Krosp was bored as well as hungry. ➤ I really like panel 2, where we see water-clouded Agatha and Krosp from the fish POV. (Although, shouldn't it look like the view through a fish-eye lens?) Seeing the fish POV doesn't serve a plot purpose; it's Art For Art's Sake. That's pretty unusual in GG, and when we do see something like that, it's usually a huge double-page extravaganza, not something understated like this. I guess maybe it does have a subtle plot purpose: getting us to see the fish as an individual, with a mind of a sort, so we feel bad when it gets eaten. And I guess probably Agatha and Krosp were drawn in focus and then blurred in Photoshop, so I shouldn't be so very impressed by the art of it. But it made me aware of Phil's art as Art, which of course it is all the time, but usually I just focus on the plot and don't notice the art. ➤ The "Finally" in panel 1 is a hint that Krosp is finding it harder than he expected to care for poppa. Rescuing him was a fun and glorious adventure for Krosp, but being a caregiver isn't fun. This, along with Agatha's hilarious "Don't fill up on snacks," reminds us that Krosp thinks he's taking care of Agatha, while Agatha thinks she's taking care of Krosp. Also worth noting that Agatha politely refers to poppa as "Dr. Vapnoople"; no more "Dr. Dim," at least not in Krosp's hearing. ➤ In Panel 5, "like the Jägers that went searching for a Heterodyne" is a genuine moment of insight for Agatha, and for us readers too (or for me at least). It's not just luck that our favorite Jägers are smarter than the ordinary ones. Interesting that the Foglios immediately turn it into a joke, rather than leave us to think about it. Bkharvey (talk) 17:09, May 25, 2018 (UTC) Wow. I didn't think all of the new characters would drop out of the story completely on the next page when I made my comment about minor characters on Wednesday. Well, I'm sure Rakethorn will be back at least. And, while it didn't occur to me until Fred1740 mentioned it last time, I was looking forward to the mechainical nose being revealed in the drain, leading to an old-fashioned British murder mystery to complement the noir detective story of Ivo Sharktooth PJ. Maybe later. -- William Ansley (talk) 04:01, May 26, 2018 (UTC) : "Old-fashioned British" reminds me: all those weird nicknames (Snacky, Tobber, Troggo) are a parody of British prep school (≈ US middle school) practice, according to the murder mysteries that take place at one. If we are to take seriously their use by the adult sparks here, the implication would be that they've known each other since they were 11 or so. (Hard to imagine with respect to Troggo, although I suppose he could be a middle school exchange student who overstayed his visa.) Bkharvey (talk) 04:09, May 26, 2018 (UTC) : P.S. Or, at a more metaphoric level, perhaps we are meant to think that the sparks are emotionally like 11-year-olds; maybe the social power of sparks lets them get away with not growing up. Bkharvey (talk) 04:12, May 26, 2018 (UTC) ::Never read anything by P. G. Wodehouse? (If not, you should.) That's where Phil is getting the upper-class British adult-nickname thing; we know he's a fan, since he named Wooster after one of Wodehouse's main characters. --Geoduck42 (talk) 18:04, May 26, 2018 (UTC) :::No, actually, but I know that's a source of info on the custom. But, unless Wodehouse suggests otherwise, I still say those adults got the nicknames in prep school. And those who later grow up outgrow them. The whole point of the parodying of the British upper class is that they didn't, generally, do any work. I may be totally misremembering, but I believe the beginning of the end of the British family estates was a change in inheritance law so that the child who inherited the house didn't also inherit most of the money, so it became impossible to maintain the estate -- all those servants cost money. Conversely, before the change, the landholder/titleholder had a ton of money and didn't work for a living. Bkharvey (talk) 01:06, May 27, 2018 (UTC) :::: Wodehouse mostly wrote light comedy set in a semi-mythical period "between the wars" and featuring, yes, the idle (and mostly useless) urban rich, although he included plenty of impoverished gentry trying to unload their now-useless estates on some nouveau riche millionaire. And yes, many of his adult male characters are still carrying around prep-school nicknames. Still, while his stories are often extremely funny, I wouldn't call them a good source of real-world information. --Geoduck42 (talk) 08:49, May 27, 2018 (UTC) Sparks having the maturity of 11-year-olds is why I don't think Krosp designed/requested that fish grabber. If you're a typical Spark, with the typical ADHD-tween-like behavior so many sparks exhibit, and you work in a lab with a glass wall looking out at sea creatures swimming by, you're gonna occasionally see something interesting swim by that you want to take a look at. So of course you'd build a fishing minigame into your wall, it serves multiple purposes. It's a fun way to take your mind temporarily off your current engineering problem, purely as a game, like playing Solitaire or Minesweeper on your computer. It's a fun way to grab potential research specimens, for the sparks who dabble in turning people into fish and fish into people. It's a fun way to grab anything that swims past that's interesting or unusual enough to be something that might have escaped from a lab or been mutated by stray chemicals/radiation from one of the labs. And, if you likes your fishies raw and wriggling like Krosp here does and Trogulus might, it's a fun way to grab a snack without having to leave your lab to go down to the mess hall or the vending machine room. Martin The Mess (talk) 10:37, May 26, 2018 (UTC)